Our roadmap for transforming Jisc’s Library Support Services

Jisc has been working on a transformation programme to develop a more effective, efficient and cohesive set of library services to meet the needs of its members and deliver a number of benefits.

The programme includes seven separate Jisc services: Copac Collection Management Tools; Copac; Jisc Collections; Knowledge Base+; JUSP; SUNCAT and Zetoc; as well as the RLUK shared cataloguing service. The transformation will redevelop these services in a number of phases, delivering them in a fresh, streamlined and sensible way. Rather than visiting eight separate and distinct services, users will encounter only three sites which will encompass all the existing service functionality. The three new service areas have been formally named under a new collective offer, Library hub, with individual names reflecting the functions that each area delivers. The new names, indicating the consolidation of current services, are listed below.

Benefits to you

The transformation programme is intended to bring about key benefits that will improve our offer both in the short term and into the future. The developments will save users time in using our services, making the experience simpler and more intuitive. Detailed benefits and what the programme will deliver are below:

1. We will simplify our service portfolio so that it is easy to understand, provides clarity about what our services do and how they support your work.
2. We will implement a modern and consistent design across our services delivered to accessibility standards, providing the same experience for any user, making it easier to move between services.
3. We will enable you to exploit data held within Jisc’s services to support you to do your job more efficiently and effectively
4. We will extend automation over manual processes within and across our services, enabling users to exploit the data within more efficiently.
5. We will coordinate and consolidate our service communications, including our training provision, which will be made simpler via the clear and consistent offer.
6. The transformation of our infrastructure will ensure that our services can more easily accommodate and support changes in our sector into the future.

How will TLSS deliver the benefits?

The TLSS programme involves several different and wide-ranging projects, including both individual and overlapping, cross-service projects. These are listed below:

• National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK): https://www.jisc.ac.uk/national-bibliographic-knowledgebase
• Jisc Collections e-commerce site
• Data orchestration
• User experience redesign of services
• Consolidation of supporting infrastructure

Of these, the user experience re-design of the service interfaces is the one that will have the most immediate impact to using the services.

User experience and redesign

Over the last year, we have been working with user experience consultants to plan and progress a way forward that will deliver the coherent vision mentioned above. As part of that process, we have had input from service users, as well as extensive research into the services and workshops with service teams.

The conclusion of our planning work produced a roadmap for delivery which will see the consolidation of the seven services listed above into three distinct service areas described by their functional areas and shown below:

1. The Discover and Compare functional area incorporates four of our Discovery services, plus the RLUK shared cataloguing service, which will essentially bring together the outputs of the NBK project with the alerts function from the Zetoc service.
2. Buy and Manage, or Collections plus as the interface will be named, will merge the KB+ service functionality with the upcoming Jisc Collections e-commerce site.
3. Analyse usage data, or Analytics, although currently only includes JUSP, the expectation is that over time, other usage or data related services could be incorporated with a wider scope than e-resources data, for example.

Phased delivery and next steps

The new designs and interfaces will be delivered in phases through 2019 and 2020. The first phase will see the release of the Discover interface and more detail on that will be coming in February 2019.

Why are we doing TLSS?

The origins of this programme stem from an extensive review of our library support services in 2015, which had input from 80 UK academic library staff as well as UK stakeholder groups SCONUL and RLUK. The review was instigated as it was recognised by Jisc that its offer was found to be fragmented, complicated and service-driven, rather than being driven by the needs of service users. Also, we were keen to ensure that our services remained valuable for our members in an environment where libraries face both fundamental challenges and opportunities. The review outlined a number of recommendations, which have formed the basis of this programme. A summary of the review, Jisc library support services: enhancing efficiency and effectiveness, is available on the Jisc website: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/library-support-services-enhancing-efficiency-and-effectiveness.